


detsiwt em tog ev'uoy

by bokutoma



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Human/Monster Romance, Lesbian Helen Richardson, they/them pronouns for oc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:06:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23234449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bokutoma/pseuds/bokutoma
Summary: helen is all twisted up, and they only make her more so
Relationships: Helen Richardson/OC
Comments: 10
Kudos: 14





	detsiwt em tog ev'uoy

**Author's Note:**

> this was requested by ludo! love u and thanks so much! <333333

Helen Richardson's star is rising.

Perhaps it's not in the same way that an actress's star might rise, all flashing lights and name splashed across front covers worldwide. Perhaps it's not even in a way that matters outside of a fifty-kilometer radius. That doesn't matter. Her star _is_ rising, and she's fought tooth and nail to make it happen.

Wolverton Kendrick is not known for its business practices regarding employee consideration or fairness. What it _is_ known for is results.

Helen Richardson, such as she is, provides these. If it takes her years (half of her entire goddamn career there) to get the credit, then that's the cost of business.

If she dreams of popping out smarmy Jeremy's eyes with one spindly finger, dreams of eating them like gourmet truffles, then that's the cost of business. (That's not right, that comes later, but oh, she had _wanted_. She just hadn't had a name for all that desire before.)

She's always been clever, always been tough, but her tenure here in Wimbledon has taught her to scrap, to eat men alive if they won't give her what's hers by right and hard work. Tom, ten years her senior in both age and experience here, likes to poach her clients whenever and however he can; she makes certain the big boss catches him flirting with the receptionist, the one she knows he has an eye on. Mabel, old as St. Michael's in Coventry and holding up half as well, takes the emergence of one of the few other women in the agency as a personal threat. Helen takes what she's learned from Tom and poaches her clients and does a damn sight better with them.

Helen Richardson has no allies. There is no one in Wolverton Kendrick she can trust. That's alright, though. She's quite used to being underestimated.

* * *

Helen Richardson's star has fallen.

Where is she? It does not matter. The curly-curly man with the curly-curly hair and the curly-curly spine will not come after her. He will not notify anyone of what has happened to her. He _is_ what has happened to her.

There might have been a real face behind that too friendly one. It's impossible to say with it long-buried but not quite dead.

 _Black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow_.

It's green. The wallpaper is green.

In the mirror, she is crying.

* * *

Helen Richardson's star is rising, and it will always rise. Sir Isaac Newton is wrong. Gravity is not real and never has been, at least when it comes to her.

Wolverton Kendrick does not deserve her, but for now, it's the best she's got. She does not need friends. They would not need her back.

The St. Alban's Avenue job will be easy. It will be _exactly_ what she needs, and nothing will go wrong.

Nothing will go right, either, but she hadn't thought to ask for that.

* * *

Helen does not have a star. She does not need one, slavering and hungry for something intangible as she is. She had a last name once. Probably. There was a job, too; wolves all the way down, wolves and their ever so rich prey, wolves that didn't know the meaning of pack mentality.

The curly-curly man had found her in the end. Maybe she had done exactly what he'd expected of her; maybe he had never _not_ known where she was. Either seems equally likely. Either seems equally terrifying.

She touches the green (Is that the name of the color? It's so hard to remember.) and recalls that the curly-curly man is actually curly-curly Michael. What a strange name that is.

No stranger than Helen, though.

If she ever had to name a spiraled child, twisted up like a bent slinky, she would probably call it nothing, or maybe even not-there.

* * *

Helen Richardson really, desperately wishes that her star was called Polaris.

Any sort of North Star would do, really. There have been many over millennia, replaced when they start to go wrong. She just needs a guide.

She's been willing for hours. Among the ceaseless cacophony of color, she has gone dehydrated and dizzy, floating away from the fragile few tethers that remain to her.

 _Black, yellow, green. Yellow, black, green. Green, black, yellow_. It doesn't matter which way she counts them when the colors never change. Desperation is a bad look on her, she knows, but then according to these mirrors, every look is at least a little bit bizarre on her face, stretched lips, and too long hands.

This corridor is endless. If she ran all the way back to where she started, at that godawful open but somehow still cluttered house on St. Alban's Avenue, would she even be able to reach it? She is growing delusional; she has already always been there.

What rhymes with Polaris? _Heiress, embarrass, awareness_. What is awareness? The forever spiral of the carpet and the nauseating ripple of the wallpaper are oppressive. It bulges out, caves in, trying to chew into her.

She keeps walking. She will be walking forever. What else can she do? The name _Richardson_ tastes like a thousand needles pushed through her tongue.

When she opens her mouth, blood comes pouring out.

She could turn right. Why hadn't she before? There must have been a reason. Probably. That reasoning must have made sense to Helen Richardson. Probably. If she swallows this next mouthful of blood, Helen Richardson will explain it to her. Probably.

It doesn't work.

She turns right, and the world warps further. Through a mouthful of crushed cherries and sticky syrup, she says _Wolverton Kendrick_ like it's a lifeline.

What does any of that even _mean_?

There is something sticky on her forehead too, but when she wipes it away, her hand is coated in something clear. There is not clear syrup; she may not eat much breakfast, but even she knows that. When she licks her hand, she tastes like a salt lick.

Just ahead, only a thousand kilometers away, is the curly-curly man.

He is beyond the curve of the corridor; he is impossible to see. Still, she can spot him coming, running faster than any person should be able to move. His hands are not curly. No, they are lethally straight and sharp, and for the first time since she can remember (which isn't much, in all fairness), Helen is dreadfully, horribly afraid.

* * *

She would never admit this to anyone - not even a completely unrelated stranger - but Helen Richardson finds the house she's showing on St. Alban's Avenue atrocious. The open floor plan connects all the wrong areas, the rooms all feel congested despite ostensibly being spacious, and there are far, far too many doors. If rich bastards had any sense, they'd flee from this monstrosity as soon as they stepped foot inside.

Helen, however, is not in the business of selling sense, and the wealthy have very little of it to go around. The sooner she can sell this architectural mistake, the sooner she can spend time in a house that _isn't_ vaguely alarming.

Every family that comes through is a different breed of painfully posh: the tech moguls whose Bluetooth ears she wants to rip off, the business magnates who look down their noses even at the things that are up to their standards, the old money heirs that try far harder than they really need to in order to make her feel like dirt. It would be overwhelming if she weren't so crushingly, mind-numbingly used to it.

Michael, however, is different.

It's not even the lack of a handshake. While it's not common for someone to refuse this most basic pretense of equality, it's not rare either, even for a proxy. It's not his twitchy manner, either; more than a decent chunk of her clientele have the telltale vibration of someone riding out an exceptional high.

Michael is just...wrong.

There is something behind those eyes. He won't meet her gaze for more than a second at a time despite the fact that he apparently couldn't care less about the house itself. Those frightful eyes draw her in only to nauseate her, and if she hadn't been playing a game of political chess with that wretched cunt Mark at the office, she might have a harder time justifying why she isn't punching him in the face at that very moment.

The frenetic energy in his eyes triggers every defensive urge in her body.

Really, the door she doesn't recognize is the least of her worries at that point, and when that slippery bastard traps her, she can only congratulate him on a game well-played.

 _Checkmate_.

* * *

The Archivist is not a nice man. Very likely, no one has ever described him this way. Very likely, no one ever will. Still, he is kind enough in his slouched, tired way. He says he believes her, in the end, and while she might have normally believed such talk to be the polite dismissal which must become part of the job, there is none of that in his voice.

Even though he doesn't know the truth, the Archivist still knows he has no time for niceties like that.

If she leaves through the wrong door, she doesn't notice.

For that matter, neither does the Archivist, but that's alright. He'll learn.

Probably.

* * *

Sometimes, in her endless Wandering, Helen almost-Richardson sees pictures that flicker into something different, there in the low light of Michael and their infinite corridors. There is that hideous house, the one they both hate at this point (she hates it more, so it stays). Along the first infinite stretch is the shining white light of the sun glinting off endless spirals of ice - Sannikov Land. So translucent against the image of more corridor, coming in brief snatches that she can barely make out, is her home.

If she lifts the right mirror, the Archives are nearly in her grasp.

There are a lot of things that she has sacrificed to remain here, mostly alive if not whole, but she knows what isn't optional.

Michael. Helen. These are facts, even if they don't make sense. She just has to remember that.

In the distance, there is circus music. There has always been all sorts of noise, some of it music and some of it not, here in the Michael-Helen-Distortion, but here in particular, somewhere in _reality_ , there is circus music.

God, she hates it.

Michael is gone. Not for good, of course, but he's outside. All things considered, Helen has dealt with many empty houses with a thousand empty corridors.

It is a very simple matter to lock the door.

* * *

There is a part of Helen that misses having _Richardson_ attached, feels it like the loss of a limb. That part is screaming and crying, howling for mercy.

It is a very small part of her, though, and Helen is very, very, very big. Besides, she has it figured out now, the delicate balance between wants when she should have none. (Poor little Archivist; perhaps he should be taking advice from her, and isn't that a delightful thought? She still likes him, though. He is kind in a way that Helen Richardson could understand, and if he is not so in the traditional manner, what of it? She likes things a bit upside down.)

She had not lied to him, fragile as he was and as fun as that might have been.

She did what she needed to when it came to feeding, and she was ever so hungry.

* * *

Helen does not know why the doors called her to this one. As far as fears go, It Is Not What It Is does not pulse in their veins or quicken their breath the way the Choke or Viscera did. It lives there, of course, as they all do, squirming beneath the surface, but it is not the worst of them, and by all accounts should not have been as viable an option for feeding as, say, the father of one Ivo Lensik.

What had Michael called the two of them once, in that wonderfully pretentious way of his? The Throat of Delusion.

Perhaps she has even deluded herself. Wouldn't that be funny?

They are funny, she thinks, all strange imaginings and deepest black. Would Helen Richardson have liked them? Impossible to say. There, somewhere in the endless twists and turns of her corridors, lives a memory of someone else who was all _black black black_ , all doom and gloom.

They are not like Gerard Keay, she thinks, but there is some of the same curiosity in the ink that stains their fingers. She likes curiosity, mostly. It leads to those who would open the door.

Perhaps, living in the strange beasts that come out of their hands, there lives the essential knowledge of the world, the thought of which doesn't repulse Helen like it might have Michael. Perhaps, with the right guidance, they could put their skill to use in service of a master, crafting like the Worker of Clay. Perhaps Helen could _be_ that guidance.

Selfishly, though, Helen doesn't want to send them off to assist anyone else. She could make them work just as well, given the right entry (Is that a delusion as well?).

For now, she retreats, only the faint creaking of hinges able to mark that she had ever even been there at all.

(Perhaps she _will_ dine on Jeremy's eyeballs after all. Nothing brings more relief than a seventy sense feast.)

* * *

As it turns out, Jeremy's fear tastes better than his eyes - she tried one, just to check - and she is eating quite well these days. Also, it turns out that ignoring your problems does not fix them, even when you are half avatar, half fathomless being, and entirely made out of fear. Helen Richardson would find that bullshit, and to be honest (for once), Helen herself does too.

Well, most of them do, actually, and she finds that that's probably a more than generous offer.

 _They_ , however, do not leave whatever passes for her mind. Even the black spirals that twist and tangle across her carpet have gone from comfortably disquieting to reminiscent of ink stains, swirling patterns that are not hers. In this way, she can almost understand what it is that leaves her prey so lost in her endless loops.

Here is the problem: Helen Richardson had been a lesbian. That isn't a problem, really, but it ties into her current one, so she thinks it sort of applies. If she thinks hard enough about it, puts a little more _Richardson_ into it than usual, she is probably still a lesbian, insofar as she can experience attraction toward anyone anymore. She wouldn't know, really, except that that is the only word that feels even remotely similar to what this fixation is.

She'll chalk this up to another failure of Beholding just for the hell of it.

The hinges of her door only creak when she wants them to, so the air is dead silent when she pushes it open. They are working over another drawing, more art, and Helen discovers that she finds them far more palatable than the Worker of Clay. There is something so very human, so very raw in the knobs of their spine and the exhaustion that presses down on them.

Presses down? She doesn't like that. They are not marked, not yet, but there is too much of the Choke in the intangible weight that bears down on them from all sides. _Not yet_ , she says and thinks and does, tearing at the air with sharp fingers. They do not hear her, but the words were not meant for them anyway. Instead, she watches as their back straightens slightly, some of that permanent sleepiness and discomfort torn away. It leaves them winded, she thinks, but that's the price of help, and she does not regret it, even enjoys watching them gasp.

She casts a shadow on the page then, but they, so wonderfully oblivious, don't notice, too busy being wrapped in the sharp pain she had cleaved into the core of them. They groan a little as their psyche tries to stitch up the wound she has left, and in that soft, ink-smeared noise, she leaves, hinges creaking once again.

Oh, she can hardly wait to see more.

* * *

The next time that Helen visits, they are asleep and dreaming of Viscera. In a way, it makes sense that the Flesh is their muse, all exposed lungs and dripping, trailing entrails as their medium of choice, but that doesn't mean she has to like it.

Instead, she balances their temples on the spindly points of two fingertips, each a hair from breaking skin, and forces waking memories of endless spirals that the eye cannot follow to their destination, bodies wrong but whole, and Lichtenberg lightning streaking across the sky.

They convulse once, twice, then settle into a sleepy sort of shuddering, one arm pulling back at an angle so odd as to be nearly dangerous. That curious, juddering groan forces its way out of their throat again, and for a moment, Helen thinks she can see dried blood on their tongue.

Then it disappears, and they quiet, exhausted even as they rest, a faint sheen of sweat beading on their brow. For the first time, she can explore this room without the concern of being seen. She has free reign.

What a terrible idea.

Still, she is more careful than she might usually be, sharp points of her too many joints held away from what might be damaged by them. Around her, everywhere she can see, is the life cycle of art, from sketches to prints, and there is something in every inked line that has even her somewhere next to mesmerized. Around her are rats with crowns, teeth bared and angry, snakes and split-skull women who grin and hiss in equal measure, half-human things that look like totems to forgotten gods. Each one of them is beautiful and terrifying, and again, Helen wonders what they could do with a taste of _real_ power. What wonders could be made for It Is Not What It Is, for Helen herself?

They stir in their bed, and it is time for her to go. There are bits of Viscera stuck in her teeth, anyway, and it will be better to sort that out away from them.

Perhaps they catch a glimpse of her as she leaves this time, but it's only right that she replace the muse that she had stolen so jealously.

This time, she visits Mabel, frail as she is now. She wouldn't survive a long game, Helen knows, so she does not feel wasteful even as she forces the doddering old bitch into her corridors with high-grade delusions.

The taste of blood as she takes Mabel apart with lethal swipes and rearranges her into something altogether impossible feels close to right, and if she takes a nibble or two, she can hardly be blamed for sating the urges of the Flesh she does not have and has never been.

She does what she needs to when it comes to feeding, after all.

* * *

It is It Is Not What It Is that makes the final play for them, and Helen _seethes_. There is not much room for hate in an existence like hers, but she feels it toward the Stranger, pitiful and exhausted though its servant may be.

Breekon is alone, no Hope for him, and he cannot do much more than pull up to their street before Helen is stepping out of a door next to the real one, no curves to her at all.

"Hello there, Distortion," he says, pausing like he's still waiting for someone else to finish his sentences. Pitiful bastard. "What brings you...'round these parts?"

"What's your scheme, little strongman?" she counters, and there are teeth in her arms as her smile moves there, too. "There's only one of you now. What do you think you can do?"

"This isn't...your home...or your mark. The Buried and the Flesh left, and now it's my turn. They aren't...for you."

"Wrong answer," she says, all smiles, and then Breekon and his shoddy delivery van are gone, entirely swallowed up.

The lights flicker on inside their house, and Helen is tired of not being seen, tired of not feeding. When the blinds open, she waves, not bothering to disguise her hands or the further twists and turns her body had taken.

They wave back.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on twitter @kingblaiddyd


End file.
